Plan to bring police into schools outlined by Harrisburg district leaders

Updated Dec 11, 2019; Posted Dec 10, 2019

Harrisburg police Officer Chris Palamara, left, and Cpl. Josh Hammer greet Foose Elementary School students as they arrive for the first day of school, August 26, 2019.
Dan Gleiter | dgleiter@pennlive.com

If in-school police officers are re-introduced in Harrisburg schools next year, their purpose will not be to arrest or charge misbehaving students — it won’t even be disciplinary.

Instead, the officers’ purpose in schools will be to act as role models to students, building positive relationships between the local police department and the wider community while providing educational opportunities and support.

That was a point that Harrisburg School District Receiver Janet Samuels and Acting Assistant Superintendent Chris Celmer made clear when they appeared Tuesday evening before members of city council, who were hosting a 2020 budget hearing.

“As a school district we are committed to ensuring ... the welfare of our students,” Samuels said. “We are committed to working with the city in a very positive and a very proactive way."

They were in attendance to discuss the proposed return of a school resource officer program, which would see city police officers assigned solely to district schools for the first time in more than a decade. It’s a proposal that has been presented alongside a draft of the city’s 2020 budget.

On Tuesday, Celmer provided some details about how the school resource officer program would work, explaining that an agreement — if approved by city and district officials — would allow for the creation of two in-school officer positions.

If successful, that number could grow to six officers by the 2022-23 school year, Celmer said. That’s only if district and city budgets allow for growth. As the agreement is being considered, salaries paid to school resource officers will be split evenly between the district and the city.

Assuming they are both 5-to-6-year officers, they would each make about $70,000, Harriburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse said previously.

Even if the number of resource officers grows to six, it will be far fewer than the 15 that were assigned to patrol area schools nearly two decades ago, before the program fizzled out in 2008 amid a financial crisis affecting both the district and the city.

“We are not proposing that type of plan with what we are thinking,” Celmer said.

Instead, a new Harrisburg school resource officer program would follow guidelines since established within the state’s Public School Code, Celmer said. They’re guidelines that did not exist the last time Harrisburg had officers in local schools.

Addressing council members, Samuels said they should expect a program “very different than what you have been exposed to before.” Both Samuels and Celmer said they have worked with resource officers while serving as administrators in other districts, describing the programs as beneficial.

“This is not a negative,” Samuels said.

Last month, district officials announced some of the duties resource officers would be permitted to carry out, including working to identify physical changes that can be made to reduce crime in and around schools; providing crime prevention and safety education to students; increasing gang awareness; training students in conflict resolution and crime awareness; and developing and expanding community justice initiatives for students.

“Often they are eyes and ears so that we can be proactive to prevent certain circumstances from occurring,” Samuels said.

That’s in additional to providing training to staff security guards, who would remain in their positions despite the introduction of resource officers, Samuels said.

It’s a plan that Harrisburg Police Commissioner Thomas Carter said he can support.

“We are happy to partner with the school district,” Carter said at the Tuesday hearing. “We want to cut that high-school-to prison pipeline.”

Carter elaborated, explaining that police officers will not be in the schools “to charge kids or to give kids criminal records.”

“We are only up there as a resource to them,” he said.

And Samuels mad it cleat that the resource officers will not be involved in disciplinary actions at the schools, which will continue to play out under district officials’ oversight and according to their policies and procedures.

The resource officers would be selected from within Harrisburg’s current police force, with interested officers submitting their applications for consideration, it was announced Tuesday. From there, officers would be interviewed and selected for the roles by a joint panel of city and school district officials, Samuels said.

All of that, is contingent on approval of the program, which is tied to the 2020 city budget, Papenfuse pointed out Tuesday night. The proposed budget will be presented to city council members for a vote later this month.